Everyone is impacted during an emergency, but children are particularly vulnerable, not only due to physical risks but also because they often lack the knowledge to respond safely and appropriately to an emergency. It’s important to give your children the knowledge and skills they need to understand and respond confidently and safely when a crisis arises. Everyone benefits: the children who are directly impacted as well as those rendering aid.
Teaching children about emergency preparedness is a balancing act. You want children to understand the potential severity and impact of disasters without paralyzing them with fear. The key to good balance is to use clear language and age-appropriate information. Present this information in a calm, matter-of-fact tone. Use age-appropriate games, rhymes, songs and role-playing to reinforce the information.
Teach the Best Response to a Crisis
Let’s start with your very first response to a disaster. Panic and anxiety can be dangerous for everyone—children and adults—when you’re in the middle of a crisis. It’s important to teach your children how to respond to stress so that they can stay calm during an emergency.
The first and best way to prepare them is to model calm, proactive behavior. They’ll feel more at ease if
you include them in the planning and prepping process. As you develop your family’s emergency plan, ask them what their concerns are during a potential disaster and ask them for ideas on how to address those concerns. Let them help build your emergency kits, store water, or rotate food supplies.
Beginning when they are toddlers, teach children self-calming techniques. Teach them to take slow, deep breaths when they feel scared or anxious. Focusing on their breathing can help them slow down their heart rate, clear their mind, and avoid being overwhelmed by the situation.
It starts with a plan
Every good emergency response starts with a plan. No matter what your child’s age, you should have a family plan for how to respond to a variety of emergencies. Download the Family Emergency Plan booklet and sit down with your children to develop the plan your family will follow if there is an emergency.
Practice the plan with them. When children are familiar with the plan, it will help them mentally, emotionally as well as physically. They will think more clearly and they can act quickly and confidently. This will reduce anxiety and confusion and makes it easier for the adults responding to the emergency. They’ll remember each step in the plan so that they can act without hesitation.
Practicing gives them a confidence that makes it easier to respond appropriately to instructions from adults or emergency personnel.
Teaching Children 2-5 years old:
The youngest children should know the following:
Recognize emergencies
Teach them identify what constitutes an emergency, such as smoke in the house, a loud alarm, or a medical situation that requires immediate help.
Identifying themselves
As soon as they can begin to talk, children should learn how to identify themselves. They should be able to give their full name, address, and phone number and that of their parents.
Use 911
Teach how to dial 911 and when to use it. They should be able to tell the dispatcher what the problem is and where to send help.
Personal Safety
Teach little ones to be aware of dangers around them and respond appropriately: watch for cars, don’t touch moving equipment, avoid bodies of water, etc. Here is an article that will help you teach them about being safe around adults.
Teaching children 5-10 years old
Basic Safety
This is the age to teach children about fire safety: safe use of matches and open flames and how to escape a house fire.
Also teach them how to be alert to their surroundings. You’ve already taught them to look both ways before crossing a street and how to walk safely in a parking lot. Reinforce those ideas of being aware of surroundings and potential hazards. Expand their awareness skills to look out for others, especially smaller children and be ready to help them if needed.
Basic First Aid
Even young children can learn simple first aid. For the very youngest this means knowing how to clean and bandage a cut, what to do for a burn or scrape and when to get help.
Older children (8-10 years) can learn how to use a first aid kit, perform CPR, and treat sprains or insect bites. Let them help restock the family’s first aid kit so they become familiar with the supplies and how to use them.
Knots and knives
Teach them how to tie different knots for use in securing tents, making shelters and other survival tasks.
While you’re at it, teach them how to safely use a knife, including how to care for and properly store it. Knives are most dangerous when they are in the hands of those who don’t know how to properly use them.
Recognizing and foraging safe plants
Help your children learn to distinguish between safe and harmful plants. It can be vital to their safety and well-being while in the wild or during an emergency.
Food, water and nutrition
Children at this age should begin to have a good idea of what constitutes a healthy diet. They should be able to prepare a simple meal. It’s also
important to know how to tell if food is safe and how to prevent food contamination.
This is also a good age to start teaching them how to grow their own food: how to plant seeds and water and weed them. As the plants grow, they should learn how to tell when food is ready to harvest and the best ways to clean and store food from the garden.
At this age they should also know about the need for clean water. Teach them how to avoid contaminated water and different purification methods (boiling, using a filter, or water purification tablets.) It might be a fun science experiment to test the different purification methods, comparing results of the different methods.
Teaching children 10-16 years
Your children should be building on all the skills they learned in their younger years so that by this age they have a wide range of preparedness skills and a good sense of competency.
How to build a safe fire and shelter
If you take a couple camping trips each summer, your children will easily pick up this important survival skill. They should know how to start a fire using matches as well as flint. Teach them the principles of leave-no-trace and fire safety. Also teach them how to correctly use a fire extinguisher.
While they’re in the wild learning about fires, teach how to build a simple shelter using tarps or branches.
Off-grid cooking
Those summer camping trips are also a great time to learn how to cook over a fire. Dutch oven cooking goes hand-in-hand with campfire cooking. After mastering cooking over a fire, you might add solar cooking or a rocket stove to their cooking repertoire.
Maintaining and repairing belongings
This is a good age to teach children the need to be a good steward of one’s possessions. They should be able to do simple repair and maintenance on their belongings. This would include tire and chain repair on bicycles and scooters, how to replace plugs on electric cords and replacing filters and changing the oil on motorized toys.
Teach them simple clothing repair such as replacing a button, mending a small tear, or resewing a hem or seam. A small sewing kit with thread, needles and pins should be all the supplies they need for that.
When your child helps with yard work, teach them how to check and replace the oil on small engines such as lawnmowers and snowblowers. Teach them how to care for garden tools: cleaning rakes, sharpening shovels and applying oil to the handles and metal parts of tools.
Make it fun
As their parent, you know how best to adjust your lessons to your children’s ages and abilities. Children learn best in when they are having fun in engaging and memorable activities. Make these preparedness lessons fun by teaching songs or rhymes, role playing, experimenting or other hands-on activities.
This is just the beginning of the many things children should learn in order to be equipped to understand and respond to crisis situations. But the more you teach them, the better their chances of surviving the many challenges of life.
